American planes and artillery pounded the Nazi defenses for days. Tanks
then rolled into the narrow streets of the ancient city , the imperial seat of
Charlemagne, which Hitler had ordered defended at all costs. Bloody
building-to-building combat ensued until, fi nally, on October 21, 1944, Aachen
became the fi rst German city to fall into Allied hands.
Rubble still clogged the streets when U.S. Army Maj. Floyd W. Hough
and two of his men arrived in early November. “The city appears to be 98%
destroyed,” Hough wrote in a memo to Washington. A short, serious man
of 46 with receding red hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Hough had a degree
in civil engineering from Cornell, and before the war he led surveying expe-
ditions in the American West for the U.S. government and charted the rain-
forests of South America for oil companies. Now he was the leader of a mil-
itary intelligence team wielding special blue passes, issued by Supreme
Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force , that allowed Hough and his team to
move freely in the combat zone. Their mission was such a closely guarded
secret that one member later recalled he was told not to open the envelope
containing his orders until two hours after his plane departed for Europe.
In Aachen, their target was a library.
THE FIGHTING FOR AACHEN WAS FIERCE.